Rule 4 of Cosmetic Work - A Deep Dive
Do not pay for cosmetic work with borrowed money. Do not get work that you cannot afford.
Some of you may be gawking at the screen right now, but trust me on this…
First of all: the scenario where you pay for your cosmetic work on a credit card because you want the points, but you have the funds AND will immediately pay the bill off the following month, is excluded from this rule. This is fine; you have the money that you’re spending, albeit you’re using credit to your advantage in the very short term. Congrats on being a savvy consumer!
Do not borrow money to get cosmetic work done
In all other instances, do not borrow money to have cosmetic work done. Not from friends, family, partners, banks, credit card companies or your cosmetic practitioner. Do not take out a loan, do not borrow money that you don’t have to fund cosmetic work.
The logic for this is three-fold:
Cosmetic work is surprisingly emotional. Even if you’re not having ‘actual’ surgery, you’re identifying a vulnerability in yourself and you’re hoping to overcome it by getting a procedure done. There is an inevitable expectation involved, a sense of “Do I feel different now, because I really wanted to?”. The majority of procedures have a lag time before the results are seen, which can lead to anxiety that it hasn’t ‘worked’.
If you’re having surgery that involves a general anaesthetic, you will likely feel quite weird for several days: confused, tired, sore. You might have thrown up terrifying black liquid afterwards.
Surgery - even done by an excellent surgeon - is traumatising for the body. You will almost certainly be in pain afterwards. You will likely have bruising. It may be dramatic. You may have reduced mobility. That’s infantilising. You may be having to hide out at home for a couple of weeks because you look, frankly, scary. Your appetite might be affected.
You may feel shame, regret, apprehension, helplessness, anger, panic. If you’ve ignored The Rules, you may have had an unrealistic expectation of your cosmetic outcome and be experiencing profound despair. You may also have disregarded your practitioner’s advice and be frustrated that you can’t yet see the result that you wanted. It may take up to a year for you to be able to do so.
Do not compound this highly emotional time with the stress of now owing money - probably a sum in multiple thousands - for a procedure that hasn’t changed you into the person you’d always dreamed of being, overnight. Debt can be extremely nerve-wracking, psychologically. Do not add this pressure to yourself.
Cosmetic work is FUCKING EXPENSIVE. I’ve spent (conservatively) £12k on Botox alone so far.
If you have good cosmetic work, it’s habit-forming and can be addictive.
If you borrow the £300 to get Botox the first time on a couple of areas and then you love it, what are you doing in 4 months’ time, when it needs a top-up and you’ve also decided that you want another area done?
And that’s at the absolute cheapest end of this market. A lot of cosmetic work also needs periodic refreshes across the decades. If you borrow £10k to get a full mouth of veneers (and those would be extremely cheap veneers), there’s a decent chance you’ll only just have paid them off by the time they need replacing.
If you can’t afford to get the work done now, you almost certainly can’t afford to pay to maintain its upkeep. That’s very, very dangerous.
If you get into the habit of spending money that you don’t have on cosmetic work, you will soon find this spiralling to an unsustainable degree. Please don’t.
As detailed in Rule 2, cosmetic work is essentially a shortcut, a substitute for doing the inner work to radically love and accept yourself exactly as you are. Cosmetic work is an attempt to artificially alter our or others’ perception of ourselves.
That doesn't mean it’s ‘bad’. I LOVE the work that I’ve had done and have #goodvibesonly about it. But it does mean that it’s incredibly unwise to fund a shortcut with quick-fix financing, whether formally (loan/credit card etc) or informally (Bank of Mum and Dad etc).
As a general rule, exercise extreme caution when considering cosmetic work by a clinic that offers financing or a payment plan. Most expert practitioners have enough patients to treat without needing to offer incentives to fill their rosters. Also, these clinics encourage the one-size-fits-all, fast-fix, conveyor-belt approach to cosmetic work that I’m extremely keen to dissuade you from.
Do not go abroad to get a procedure done on the cheap that you can’t afford in your home country
It should be obvious that if you can only afford cosmetic work by travelling abroad to get it, to a country that you’re not a resident of, nor have ever been a resident of: DO NOT GET THAT PROCEDURE DONE ABROAD ON THE CHEAP. I’m going to say this again, but in bold. DO NOT GET THAT PROCEDURE DONE ABROAD ON THE CHEAP.
I’m sure some of you know of a friend of a friend who went to Turkey or Poland or somewhere and it was GREAT. I know those people too. I talk about cosmetic work all of the time, so let me save you some time, money and disappointment: I don’t know a single person who actually went to that place that their friend’s friend recommended in a far-off land and came back happy with the result.
You may have seen an influencer jet off to somewhere and post about their results, beaming. Both of the below will apply:
1) They got that procedure for free. You’re watching an advert. Don’t choose a surgeon based on an advert.
2) I guarantee that within 3 years they’ll be getting that procedure re-done somewhere closer to home OR they’ll be posting mournfully about how much they regret having had the procedure done.
If it’s a procedure that you can save money on even after paying for a flight and accommodation by doing it abroad, it’s a significant enough procedure that you should be meeting with 2-3 consultants in person before deciding on a surgeon and THEN meeting that surgeon at least once more before your final consultation pre-surgery with them.
And it would be wisest to leave at least 6 weeks between each of those consultations. I know you might not be able to restrain yourself, but I’m telling you what’s wisest, not what everyone reading this will realistically adhere to.
But, do remember, for surgery of this significance, where there are thousands of pounds potentially able to be saved, you will be living with the results of that surgery for decades. Probably the remainder of your life. If I told you you could only wear one pair of shoes for the rest of your life, I doubt you’d be immediately haring off to find the cheapest possible pair that you could lay your hands on, in order to save money.
Take your time with this. Understand that it’s an investment. And then consider the following:
If you don’t speak the language of the country you’re going to, don’t assume you’ll easily make yourself understood. It’s difficult enough to translate your aspirations, insecurities and deepest fears for a surgeon when you both share the same first language.
The clinic may boast “English-speaking staff” on their shiny website, but just because the receptionist can organise a taxi for you doesn’t mean that your surgeon will understand the nuance between ‘twisted’ and ‘bent’. Then think about all of the other words that you might want to use, many of which will have very precise meanings in your language and may not have equivalents in your surgeon’s native language.
Aesthetic norms vary significantly across geographies. There are incredible surgeons in South Korea, but I would hesitate to go there for a facial procedure, as the vast majority of those surgeons’ patients and experiences will be on South Korean faces and for South Korean aesthetic sensitivities. You want a practitioner who is boringly familiar with your face/body type.
You know how people with curly hair always look for a hairdresser who really understands curly hair and have had their barnets butchered by an excellent hairdresser who just doesn't understand curly hair? It’s like that. But the effects may last for the rest of your life.
Your travel insurance won’t cover any medical expenses if anything goes wrong. And things can go wrong, very easily. I’m not here to scare you, but to point out the realities. All surgery is risky. Approximately 1 million people die or face “lasting damage” from anaesthesia in “industrialised nations” every year.
If you’re not a resident and decide to have surgery done in the US, calling an ambulance can cost $1000 with health insurance (which you, my friend, will not have).
You’ll also have to navigate a foreign country’s health system whilst in an extremely vulnerable state. That English-speaking receptionist, who was so lovely when she was taking your payment, will not give two shits if you start bleeding from your eyeballs once you’ve left the hospital, no matter what the brochure might say about the clinic’s “exceptional aftercare”. Do not do this.
You want to be operated on the absolute best and most qualified/experienced surgeon that you trust will be able to give you the result that you want. That surgeon is not working in a clinic that specialises in cut-price surgeries for plastic surgery tourists. I guarantee it.
Now, there is a chance that they may one day leave that clinic and move to another country and become the world’s foremost expert at some surgery or other. That’s irrelevant. There are no rewards for early adoption here.
You do not want to be the guinea pig that taught your surgeon on their 20th procedure a hard lesson that they never repeated again. You want, YOU DESERVE, someone who is fan-fucking-tastic at their job already. Don’t date people or pick surgeons for their potential. No.
There are, obviously, amazing plastic and cosmetic surgeons all over the world and if you’ve lived in a country where there’s a particular surgeon that you really want to consult with and decide post-consultation they are absolutely, positively, the best possible person to perform your procedure, then GO NUTS (although I’m still a bit worried about your travel insurance if you’re no longer a resident or citizen of that country).
But please, please, please don’t decide to go to a random cheap clinic that you have no relationship with for the sake of a few thousand pounds. If you can’t afford to get it done without fleeing the country, you can’t afford to get it done. No matter how inconvenient it may be for me to tell you that.
Any cosmetic work undertaken should be in accordance with the other five rules. Here they are, in case you missed them the first time…
